Support The First Season

Colorful Escapes is a travel series where art is the destination. The series highlights art galleries, art museums, public art, and artist studios, as well as restaurants and hotels with an emphasis on art. Basically, if it’s creative and artistic, we’ll visit it. The show will be filmed with a road trip styling, documenting colorful sights along the way.

Art has become a huge factor for economic development with small towns being relativized because of their creativity. In a study led by Americans for the Arts, nationally, the nonprofit arts and culture industry generated $166.3 billion of economic activity during 2015. Despite the power of the arts, there aren’t many travel shows dedicated to the subject and we want to change that.

With your support, we’re going to show you that art isn’t just for some museum in New York City or Paris, but sometimes, you can find art in an alley or in nature. Become a backer on Kickstarter and help us make this show a reality.

-The Test Pilot-

While Dennis and Heide have experience with travel shows and writing, we filmed a test pilot of the show to give you an idea what Colorful Escapes will be like and for us to test some things out. Above is the 4K version of the Norman, Oklahoma episode, minus our Kickstarter pitch. We’ve definitely taken notes and plan to amp up our game when we hit the road.

However, as we mentioned in our Kickstarter video, this isn’t the first project Heide and Dennis have worked on together. Below are our videos on Davis, Oklahoma done for Dennis’ main show, Uncovering Oklahoma.

-Goals & Rewards-

For our first season, we’re keeping our plans realistic and simple. We want to film between 6 and 15 episodes for the first season, with each episode running under 30-minutes. The initial goal of $5,000 will allow us to film three cities in Texas – Dallas, Austin, and Marfa. If this is the only goal we hit, we’ll include Oklahoma City and Tulsa on our own time/dime and with our Norman episode, we’ll at least have six episodes.

Additional stretch goals will allow us to include more states, typically covering two large cities and a small town in each state.

Executive Producer Reward Locations
We have four Executive Producer rewards where this person gets to pick a city for us to highlight in the continental U.S. There is also a chance for bonus episodes depending on connections with Convention & Visitors Bureaus.

The best way you can help us make Colorful Escapes a reality is by becoming a backer on Kickstarter and encouring your friends to do the same. The next best thing you can do is to follow us on all of our social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. We’ll be sharing our adventures as we have them.

-FAQ-

When/where will the series premiere?
Our goal is to give our supporters download access by September 2018. As for when and where it will air for the public, we don’t know. Ideally, after the season is complete, we would love to sell it as an exclusive original series to the likes of Amazon, Hulu, or Netflix. We’re funding this season via Kickstarter to have complete control of the production.

When do you plan to start filming?
Filming will begin in late May, after our campaign ends on May 6. We’ll be working on our travel plans in conjunction with how well the campaign goes.

How are you able to do this for so little?
For starters, it’s just the two of us. We’ll be driving from place to place and partnering with local hotels to help keep our costs down.

I work with a gallery/Convention & Visitors Bureau. How can we get in touch with you about being featured and helping out?
Connect with us via our Contact Us page.

What will happen to Uncovering Oklahoma?
Dennis will still continue to update Uncovering Oklahoma while on the road. While there won’t be any videos from him during the filming of this project, he’ll feature guest videos and new articles. When he returns home, he’ll resume filming local stories.

Am I paying for a vacation?
No, you’re paying for us to work to make you a show. We’ll be doing 10-12 hour days, filming as much as possible. As we’re driving, the other one will most likely be doing work on a laptop. Neither of our signific others will be coming along.

Will you tell us more about yourselves?Heide Brandes is an award-winning journalist and editor with more than 18 years of experience who started her own freelance writing company in October 2012. She regularly contributes to numerous state, regional and national publications and has been published in Forbes, Silicon66, Bloomberg News, The Guardian UK, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TrailGroove Magazine, Destinations Travel Magazine, New York Daily News and the New York Times. She is also the Oklahoma correspondent for Reuters News Service. Besides freelancing fulltime, Heide is an avid traveler, medieval warrior, hiker, professional bellydancer and bellydance instructor and kind of a quirky chick who lives in Oklahoma City.

Dennis Spielman is a filmmaker and writer whose most notable work is his travel and interview series, Uncovering Oklahoma. In addition to his travel series, he’s the author of the 16th Phoenix Universe Stories, director of the feature-length documentaries, District Up! and Inviting Art, and has created several short films and music videos. He currently lives with his wife in Norman, Oklahoma with his fur babies.